Episode 7

Twenty-Five Years in NatHERS, with Tracey Cools of Efficient Living

16 April 2026 · 69 minutes · Hosted by Brian Haines, Matthew Graham and Andrew Hooper

Summary

Tracey Cools trained as a NatHERS assessor in 1999, when Camden Council was the only authority in Sydney requiring assessments. She joins the team to trace what happened between then and now — and what it says about where the profession is heading.

The early part of the conversation is a portrait of an industry that barely existed: driving to clients to collect printed plans, rubber stamping three sets, fifteen minute assessments on repeat project homes, and a business she left running with her mother and sister for three years while she travelled. From there it follows the shift that mattered most, from being an energy rater doing data entry to being a consultant a client cannot replace.

The back half is harder-edged: what seven stars did to New South Wales, why the study houses behind the code do not resemble the homes her business actually assesses, the portal failures during the NCC 2022 transition, and her experience inside the existing homes trial — including why she told CSIRO her business would not put its licence on those assessments until the tools improved.

In this episode

• 0:40Training in 1999, when one council in Sydney required assessments

• 2:05Before BASIX: collecting plans, rubber stamps and three printed sets

• 3:03A father with thermometers all over the house

• 3:46Training her mother and sister, and travelling for three years

• 5:13From energy rater to consultant, and why that made her irreplaceable

• 6:23Australia's largest consulting team, and how the market caught up

• 9:03Why the consulting angle worked when few others were doing it

• 11:44Screen sharing with clients, and what it changed

• 13:34Seven stars: the one genuine milestone in twenty-five years

• 14:20Why the NCC study houses do not resemble real projects

• 18:52New South Wales climate zones, and the carve-outs that remain

• 22:26The transition: court dates, thrown-out applications and lost clients

• 28:00What BASIX does well, and what nobody checks

• 30:41Common areas in apartments — the part Whole of Home misses

• 32:06Ten years of trying to connect NatHERS and BASIX

• 35:26Inside the existing homes trial: thirty minutes that became six hours

• 40:13Why Efficient Living stepped back from AccuRate Enterprise

• 43:23Mentoring, new tools and what the next generation needs to do

• 50:00Mandatory disclosure, geographic coverage and price

• 56:50Decade bands, assumptions, and whether an existing home rating means anything

• 1:07:00Sealing up old homes, and the risk that follows

Key points

The job used to take fifteen minutes

Working on repeat project homes she had helped design, an assessment was a change of facade, a change of neighbouring properties, and printing one page. Brian's version of the same era: sixty dollars plus GST per assessment, measuring with a scale ruler, fifteen minutes start to finish. Both describe a business that grew entirely by word of mouth, with no advertising, until the work compounded on itself.

The shift that mattered was from rater to consultant

Tracey describes the early role as data entry — tick a box, print the certificate, and everyone was chasing minimum compliance to get jobs out the door. Getting a foot back in the door meant becoming a strategic adviser instead. When you have worked with the same company for ten or fifteen years, you often know their product, their suppliers and their cost points better than most people inside the company, and at that point you are their partner in sustainability rather than a supplier they can swap out.

Send back more than a compliant report

Her practical version of that: even where an additions and alterations job in New South Wales leaves no options and is genuinely a tick-box exercise, you do not have to return only a compliant report. You can say this is your minimum compliance, and here are recommended glass types and insulation to think about when you are shopping — and tell them how the house will actually perform. Ideally you get on the phone. Her team screen share on architectural homes so clients can watch the model, see how different rooms perform, and upgrade the design with them.

Clients became receptive when seven stars arrived

All three agree the change is real: designs are more malleable now than they ever were, because the alternative is not building. Brian notes clients now accept window and design changes they would previously have refused. Matthew adds that being able to make a change live on a call, press calculate and continue talking while it simulates is what teaches a client which decisions matter and which do not.

The study houses are not the houses we build

Tracey's criticism of the analysis behind the code is that the simplest project homes are chosen, they are made to pass the cost-benefit test, and they do not reflect the range of houses actually built. Her business rarely works on the easy stuff — large glass ratios and more challenging homes are the norm. Matthew's work sits at 21 to 29 per cent glass to floor, with much of what he does pushing up to 35 per cent, against a rule of thumb around 25.

New South Wales had further to fall

Under the previous arrangements an assessor who knew the system could comply at four to four and a half stars by meeting the individual heating and cooling caps without a total load cap. NCC 2022 introduced that cap, and the jump was brutal — from every house single glazed to every house double glazed with maximum insulation. The marketing line was that BASIX averaged six stars; Tracey's point is that averages conceal the four star houses that had to move. Victoria went six to seven with a decade of preparation; New South Wales got none of that.

The transition cost real money

With certificates expiring and the portal failing, some development applications were thrown out entirely and had to start again. Clients with court dates could not resubmit in time. Her team was re-doing jobs repeatedly and hitting the same errors, with no fixes available, and lost a client who concluded the fault was theirs. She puts the exposure at up to sixty thousand dollars a month in a bad transition month, and describes issuing client updates on every communication simply to hold trust.

What BASIX has that Whole of Home does not

Asked what should be borrowed, Tracey nominates the water requirements — imperfect in how they calculate, but the presence of a water target matters — and the common areas of Class 2 buildings, where lighting layouts, ventilation and regenerative lifts deliver real gains that Whole of Home does not capture for apartments. Her sharper criticism is of enforcement: certificates are uploaded and signed off with no cross-checking, no site inspections, and no way of knowing whether the rainwater tank was ever connected. Her own parents' tank was never switched on, and nobody noticed for months.

Ten years to get a meeting

Brian describes spending a decade trying to get a meeting about connecting NatHERS output to BASIX. When he finally got one, the conditions were that he would have to build the case that it benefited every user, fund it himself, and hand the result over for everyone — which he did not consider fair. There is still no way to push a NatHERS result into BASIX or pull data out; everything is manual. The team see the existing homes work, with its tooling and data exchange, as the more likely place APIs finally appear.

Thirty minutes became six hours

Both Tracey's business and Brian's were in the existing homes scale stream trial. The benchmarks they were given — around fifteen minutes for on-site data collection and a similar time for the assessor's quality check — were what the banks would pay. In practice they were spending six hours per job. Data came back needing correction, and when a correction was made upstream, everything already done downstream was wiped and had to be redone. Both are clear that CSIRO and the administrator worked hard and fixed issues quickly, and that the tooling was simply not ready when it reached them.

Why she stepped back

Tracey told them her business would tap out once the trial ended. Her reasoning is precise: a visual tool lets you see when something is wrong, whereas AccuRate Enterprise had too many places information could hide. As a business whose income comes from new home assessment, putting the company's licence on assessments they could not properly verify was not an acceptable risk. They will return when the next generation of tools arrives, though she does not expect it to become core work — her real interest is what happens after the assessments exist, and how homes actually get upgraded.

Does an existing home rating mean anything?

The framework assumes insulation levels by decade band, because nobody is going to pull a power point off a wall to measure batt thickness or estimate the U-value of forty year old windows. Brian's concern is how much is being assumed. His own back-to-back test is the counterweight: the same dwelling rated in AccuRate Enterprise and in new-home software with an identical specification came out the same, and Whole of Home differed by about one point on a score out of a hundred. Andrew's position is that the assumptions are defensible — regulations came in around 1990, the historic programs installed known levels — and that the obligation sits with the assessor to gather as much real evidence as possible. If the owner cannot document an upgrade, the default applies.

The risk nobody is talking about

Tracey's closing concern is what happens when homeowners act on their new ratings. Seal the draughts in an old home without addressing ventilation, with gas heating still in place, and you can create mould and condensation problems that did not exist before. Her point is that the scheme needs to support people through the upgrade journey, not just hand them a number.

Documents referenced

• NatHERS publicationsTechnical Note, assessor handbook and scheme guidance material.

• BASIXThe New South Wales scheme discussed throughout this episode.

• National Construction CodeAustralian Building Codes Board — the code itself, and the Housing Provisions referenced throughout.

Transcript

Lightly edited for readability. Hesitations and repetition have been removed and technical terms corrected; the substance is unchanged.

0:07Welcome to The Rating Room, the podcast where we unpack everything NatHERS. I am Brian Haines, and alongside me are my co-hosts Matthew Graham and Andrew Hooper. Tonight we have a special guest: Tracey Cools from Efficient Living. Thank you for joining us. Thank you for having me.

0:40I have been a NatHERS assessor for a very long time now. I did my training back in 1999 — a two day course on the very original NatHERS tool. I started my career in architectural drafting, and it was a natural lean into it. Camden Council in Sydney was the only one that needed assessments at the time, but by the time I qualified all of Sydney had a pilot come out and suddenly there was more work than assessors. So I quit my job and became a full time NatHERS assessor. Licensed in 2000, so twenty-five years now.

1:40That was the RBTPA course — two days, which is what they all were originally. And this was pre-BASIX; BASIX came in around 2004.

2:05We used to go and pick up the plans from our clients. We had three main clients, and twice a week we would drive to them and pick up two sets of plans. You would highlight one, do your measurements and your data entry, and stamp the second set. Three printed copies, with the rubber stamp. It was a long time before anyone worked out how to digitally stamp things — that was a big thing in the industry, and it made everything so much more efficient. We had a stack of A3 printers: print, print, stamp, stamp. It was a laborious task.

3:03I think Dad was probably my early inspiration for getting into the industry. I had one of those fathers with thermometers all over the house. I grew up in a weatherboard house in the Blue Mountains west of Sydney with no insulation, so he would be out hosing it down at the right times, opening and closing windows, putting blankets up. I loved architecture, but I was also very attached to the environment and what was happening around houses, so when I found that space I felt comfortable in it.

3:46I actually started because I wanted to travel and it was the fastest way. I was weighing up whether to do NatHERS assessments on the side or get a pub job, and I crunched the numbers on which would get me the cash first for my big trip. But by the time I went to travel I could not find good assessors to replace me, so I trained my mum and my sister and they ran my business while I travelled. I had an income for three years on the road, and came back with a house deposit.

4:16It was easy back then. I had worked in project home companies, so it was rinse and repeat, and the tools were so simple. Literally fifteen minutes — I had worked in the companies designing the homes to begin with, so it was a change of facade, a change of neighbouring properties, and printing the one page. By the time I came back the industry had grown and it felt like a new business. Like starting again.

4:45I hated working on my own, so I wanted staff just for company. Then we decided to go for the big end of town and got into multi-residential.

5:13In the early days I probably considered myself an energy rater — data entry. You ticked a box, printed the certificate and off you went, and everyone was getting minimum compliance to get jobs out the door. There were a lot of people doing that. So to get a foot back in the door we evolved into consultants and strategic advisers for projects, and worked really hard to build relationships. People cycle through businesses, so when you have worked with the same companies for ten or fifteen years you often know their product, their suppliers and their cost points better than most people in the company. You get to the point where you are their partner in sustainability. You become irreplaceable.

6:04A lot of my staff now have two degrees coming into this industry, whereas everybody who has been in it as long as we have learned all the tools. Working closely with clients and getting out to job sites is where we found our point of difference.

6:23We were also lucky when we got a break into very large scale multi-residential. We had a very big team — back then probably Australia's biggest consulting team, fifteen staff. When you are working on a big project it is well over a hundred hours of modelling, so you need a big team. We might be tendering for a project while also subcontracting to two other engineering firms, so we had a foot in the door whichever way it went. Around 2010 to 2015 we had quite a monopoly on that market. Then the industry evolved and grew up — the big engineering firms started getting overseas modellers, other big names emerged, and it became a lot more competitive.

7:20It is similar for us. I remember night after night putting drop cards into envelopes, putting stamps on, addressing them to builders and architects and posting thousands of them all over Australia. We were doing energy assessments for sixty dollars plus GST back then, because you could do them in fifteen minutes. Get the ruler out, measure up, put in the data, send it off, invoice, done. It starts with one job, then five a week, then ten, then fifteen, and then you have hundreds of clients and it snowballs. We never advertised — it was always word of mouth and loyalty. That changed a lot with the competition in the last five years.

9:03Was consulting a deliberate strategy? That is where we really got our client loyalty. In the years up to about 2015 a lot of my staff came from an architectural background and thought about buildings that way, and I think we were better at it at that time — especially once you get to seven stars, where it is so hard just to get across the line.

10:45That one-on-one call is extremely important. You would be surprised how many architects and builders do not understand how the software works, or how a change affects the result positively or negatively. I had one today asking what effect battening out the walls by twenty-five millimetres would have. They expected a large effect, but with a non-reflective air gap and a vapour permeable barrier it is not going to do anything — yet in their mind it was going to do a lot. Having that session where they watch the calculation run and see the result gives them an understanding, and it helps you as a business owner, because your clients start to understand how difficult the job actually is.

11:44Off the back of remote working, video meetings became just part of business. It opened up the possibility of collaboration without clients coming into the office. I quite often organise a short online meeting just to show them the model — it gives that extra insight.

12:30Have you seen a difference in how receptive clients are? It has changed with NCC 2022 and seven stars. They are more receptive to making changes to the design and upgrading the window specification, because otherwise they will not be able to build the house. I am seeing a lot of malleability in design now that we did not used to see.

13:34In twenty-six years, are there specific career-defining challenges? The only massive milestone has been seven stars. We knew and anticipated how difficult it would be. We tried for a good year in advance, working with clients, getting them to change designs, getting rid of designs that were never going to work. We were talking to display villages saying you need new sites because these houses should not continue to be sold. But until it happens, nobody believes it — two of our clients were proactive and everybody else said it will not happen. So it was a huge shock.

14:20When they do the studies for the NCC they choose the simplest little project homes and make sure they pass the cost-benefit analysis, and they are not reflective of the varied houses we build. Our business in particular does not work on the easy stuff — we often have the large glass ratios and the more challenging homes.

15:05You are spot on. I do not do volume builders — mine are all one-off, either additions and alterations or architecturally designed. Glass is always a problem, and changing to seven stars, a lot of people wanted to put their heads in the sand. But because they are one-off designs there was less preparation possible; we could not say what we do for this project is representative of all your projects, because they varied so much. It was a scary change and still is for many. We have clients whose projects draw out for a long time, so they are still being assessed at six stars, and now those clients are moving to seven and getting a real surprise.

16:20At the same time I find clients very receptive once you start explaining. I had a job in the past week where I thought I just cannot get this to work, so I gave them the hit list and they said that is okay, we can work with that. I was really concerned it would kill the job off, but they were happy to talk about it — different glass sizes, different shading treatments, colours, materials. The knowledge is there with clients. They just have to be willing to apply it.

17:13The majority of my work is bespoke, medium to high end. I have to work with much higher glass to floor ratios than the rule of thumb of around twenty-five per cent. A lot of the work I have done ranges from twenty-eight or twenty-nine per cent down to twenty-one or twenty-two — either side of that target — but a lot of what I do pushes up to thirty-five per cent.

18:52There seems to be a large deviation in New South Wales with climate zones, and then the three carve-outs for climate zones 9, 10 and 11 which still work on the old heating and cooling loads with no total load. How do you get around that? It does not stop them building houses. From an assessor's point of view it is more challenging because it is so variable — the upgrades you would use in eastern Sydney are completely different to western Sydney, and different again in the southern highlands. You have to know the areas very well and have a good instinct for what will work, because you do not have time to try everything.

19:52In northern New South Wales they are still a lot easier to pass, and they are climate zones where homes are largely open — good sea breezes, and the style of housing is not really lock it up and turn on an air conditioner. They sit in their landscapes and ventilate naturally.

20:47We are still seeing some in climate zones 9 and 10 achieving compliance at 4.5, 4.8, five stars, because it is the heating and cooling load metric only, not a total load. You can juggle it — get the heating and cooling loads into compliance while the specification stays quite low. I find that a little frustrating given we are meant to be pushing for seven star houses, though I understand why they have done it.

21:52That is a big change for your clients. Like going from every house being single glazed to every house being double glazed with maximum insulation. The marketing the BASIX team put out is that we were averaging six stars, but that is not to say there were not four star houses that had to jump. We had been lobbying them for years saying Victoria was blessed — they went to six and then seven, so designers got a chance to adjust, homeowners got a chance to change expectations, and the supply chain was ready. We had none of that in New South Wales.

22:26The trends were going completely opposite to the way the code was about to come: blocks getting smaller, ceiling heights getting taller, glazing sections at 2.7 instead of 2.4, huge voids, and clients wanting that inside-outside connection. We knew it was going to be really difficult. And as we anticipated, by the time they give it to us — often two weeks before lodging the development application — you have a homeowner with a vision board ready to go and no way that home gets where it needs to be on their budget. Architects were losing clients, we were losing clients, everybody was second-guessing each other. It took a good couple of years for it to settle.

24:38I think it was the first time design really mattered. Before that you could bandaid anything — find the right window, the right insulation. At that point there were houses that simply did not work. A harbour front home, all concrete, view to the west facing the harbour, and they do not want a different style of home. The row houses in the city struggled. There are just a lot of house types that could not get there.

25:15How did you go with the transition on the planning portal? They choked, which means we all choked. Councils just got used to development applications being lodged with the BASIX to follow, sometimes months later. The ones that became really problematic were developers with development applications and court dates — if you do not resubmit at this time the whole thing gets thrown out. A couple of jobs literally got thrown out and had to start the process again. Others were begging, and we were stuck.

26:10Our clients were stressed through the eyeballs, because it is massive money for them to miss those court dates, and they are all pointing the finger at you, which makes us stressed. Trying to make money on any job when you have a large staff bill — you can lose sixty grand a month pretty quickly in some of those transition months.

26:35We went through a similar experience. It got to the point where you did not know whether to start the job again or wait for the response, because it was taking weeks. We kept doing the jobs over and hitting the same issues, and there were no fixes. We literally lost a client over it — no matter what we said or how we explained it, it was always our fault. They were a new client too, so they may have thought we were incompetent. We put out client updates on every communication just because you had to win the trust back.

27:25Are all of those kinks ironed out? No, you will still find some problems here and there. It still crops up occasionally on the network. Sometimes you do a multi-unit and it will be compliant in the NatHERS software for heating, cooling and total load, then you put it through and it will be a tenth or two of a megajoule out and non-compliant, so you have to go back and change it even though they should match.

28:00Overall BASIX has been a great outcome for New South Wales, but from an operator's point of view it has been challenging and expensive. Do you think all jurisdictions should have something like it? Victoria has always been pretty good in that space. Most of the other states have not.

28:44I think it is a real shame the things are not monitored. We upload, the certifier signs it off and uploads it to the portal, but there have never been any cross-checks and quality, so the level of compliance with certifiers is very low. And we have never gone back and done site inspections. How many rain tanks are out there where the pump stopped and nobody knows? When my mum and dad built, it took my dad a few months to realise the tank had never been turned on — they handed over the keys and the building inspector said he never turns them on, he just assumed that was a homeowner thing. Unless you are there hearing it turn on while you flush a toilet, you would not know. So if it is a long-term fix we probably need another round of homeowner education.

29:45Are there elements of BASIX that could be incorporated into Whole of Home? The water piece is really important. It is a little backwards in the way it does its calculations — the sizing of the rain tanks is not good design advice — but having a water target matters.

30:41And do you do all the common areas for Class 2 buildings — lifts, car park ventilation, lighting? That is not part of Whole of Home, and it is huge. We have made such a big difference there: some of the best lighting layouts, ventilation monitors, and the lifts are all regenerative now. There are huge benefits in the common areas of Class 2 buildings. In Victoria that would come under environmentally sustainable design requirements at planning stage, so it is still assessed, just not part of Whole of Home. But the consolidation in BASIX is good in principle, because it is all in one spot on one certificate.

32:06It does not interact with the NatHERS report in any way, and that is the difficulty. You cannot automatically input anything or extract anything — you log in, make the changes, download the certificate. It would be good if there were an API.

32:51I tried for ten years to get a meeting with New South Wales planning. I got it about six months ago and put my case together, and they said that anything I needed them to help build with the BASIX portal would require me to make a case that benefited every user, and then I had to fund it, and I had to put together all the documentation. They were going to release it to everybody, and that was the only way it was going to happen. I did not think that was very fair.

33:45I would like to have thought we had come further than that. Existing homes is maybe a good example, where you have the site tooling and AccuRate Enterprise, and I think moving forward we will probably get exchange of information via APIs. But if you are talking about new homes in New South Wales, I think we are going to be dealing with that planning portal for a very long time.

34:26I do not think you could design a less user friendly platform, and this version is worse than the old one. If you could press a button and send everything BASIX needs from your system, and produce a report at the push of a button, that is what I would be looking at. But they are not going to allow that unless somebody designs it, funds it and hands the intellectual property over.

35:26Our first introduction was a phone call I made to you during the NatHERS for existing houses scale stream that we were both involved in. Our company, your company and one other were invited. What stood out to you?

36:03When I first got the call from CSIRO I said a hard no. I have been through so many trials and testing, and they can be really time consuming — and it is a love job, you are not getting paid. But there were a couple of valuation firms involved who wanted to partner with us. I warned them a lot: they have a program that is not ready, we are going through all the pitfalls and helping them refine it, and it is going to be difficult. I think everyone went in with glossy eyes and really underestimated how much time it would take. I was not surprised. It was probably a little worse than I expected, but we were guinea pigs going in eyes open.

37:07It was a tough journey for the valuers, because they were told it would only take fifteen minutes to collect data on site, and they were already out on site anyway, so they thought this is amazing, we can sell another service. Then it comes across to us and we do a quality control check — another fifteen minutes was the number being flagged. And that was all benchmarked at that time because that is the price the banks would pay. But we would spend six hours. So half an hour became six hours. We were plotting time on jobs.

37:51By the time you work out what the issues are and it comes across, there are bugs where you do the whole check and then find an error, and they would have to resend the whole model, and it ran over everything again. To be fair, everybody at CSIRO and the administrator was amazing. They were digging deep, working huge days, and we were all supportive of each other. But it was a big learning curve, and I think it was a little early to send it out to us.

38:29As soon as we found an issue they were onto it straight away, whether a workaround or a fix. But it was one issue after another. Like yourself, we were told thirty minutes per job and it was taking hours — you could not get through more than one a day, and that is not including the person on site. And when something needed changing, they would happily make the change quickly, but when it came back it would delete everything we had previously done, so we had to go through it all again. By the end they had the kinks ironed out through what our three companies told them, and the process was a lot easier.

40:13Thoughts on AccuRate Enterprise for a scale methodology? We told them about halfway through the trial that as soon as it was over we were tapping out for a while, and that we would not be prepared to put our licence on those jobs while it was in AccuRate. With a visual tool you can see if you have a problem — a window that does not look right gives you a benchmark that something is wrong. In AccuRate Enterprise there were so many places you could hide information that it was just too risky. We are new home assessors for the largest part and that is where we earn really good money, so risking our licence was not an option.

40:50We are waiting until the next generation of tools comes out, and then we will do them. It will never be our core service — having assessors go out and do a full house assessment does not fit our business model, and for a business like ours in one location it does not work. But we always have ups and downs in workflow, so it is nice to have something to tap into during downtime. My interest is very much in what happens once all these assessments and reports are out there: how do we actually get the homes upgraded?

41:53There is also no real puzzle to solve with an established house assessment. It is whatever the star rating is. You are not trying to find the best upgrade hierarchy to get a project to seven stars, so it misses that gratification of achieving a compliant result.

42:29I am looking forward to the exact opposite. I have just started myself, and I am really hoping mandatory disclosure comes in this time — we have been hearing about it for what, sixteen years. I want to get out of the office and talk to people. I want to get away from trying to fit a circle into a square box, and simply work with a house as it is built and ask what we can do to make it better for you. I see a real advantage in that.

43:23Andrew, you and Matthew are both going to be NatHERS mentors for established homes. NatHERS has engaged us as future mentors, though of course we need to get our own training sorted first. They invited a few people to apply and I was privileged to be one of them. I am honoured to join once we have completed the training.

44:11There is a lot in it. It is going to take a good change of thought. We have new tools to play with, and new pathways.

44:53Do you know anything about the new software? I can crystal ball it. If we look at the upcoming version with three dimensional capability, that leads the way a little, because the nature of the site scanning tools is creating a three dimensional geometry, so I can see a synergy there. For me personally I would like a tool that does it all. The two-part process of a site capture app plus AccuRate Enterprise is a good proof of concept, but if I were out on site I would just like one tool — something with the scanning built in, where the geometry is automatically added to the model, and you could click and assign things while you were there and take a photo.

46:38He has been quite busy with the last release and is holding back, wanting to know there is a market for it. It costs so much money to develop these things, and we have seen existing homes try to get up and going so many times in the last two decades. I think they will cross it this time — there is too much government push for it not to happen. But there is that nervousness, trying to make a business decision when you are not sure.

47:30Until it becomes mandatory, nobody is really going to spend the money, time and effort. That is the chicken and egg. You can be first off the rank and corner the market, make mistakes and make people unhappy, or you can wait, see how others go, design your own and come out with the product everybody wants to use. So who takes the plunge first?

48:03I feel like I slightly dodged a bullet on Scorecard. I could have done it, but something just did not add up — it did not achieve the economies of scale, or the demand was not there. So that is two things in my career I have come up against, and it leaves you a little uneasy. And to add to that, I did the Victoria-centric one that was a precursor to all of this. We keep hearing it is coming, and we are still waiting — and we do not even have mandatory accreditation for new homes. Anything with the word mandatory in it seems to be a real challenge.

49:56I do not think they can get to mandatory until they have the geographical spread. That was the big calling card for me. Once they said we can separate the role of the data collector and the qualified assessor, I thought, we have networks out there in building surveyors, valuers and real estate agents who can be trained — I think it is only a two day course for them to do the data collection piece. When you worked with the valuers, that is what they do. They are so good at it, doing their own measurements already. There was a little of no, you have not collected this, or read the hot water label correctly.

50:39I would love to see eventually that it is a qualified assessor who goes out and works with the homeowner. But that is going to cost a very different price point.

51:29Can you imagine getting an inquiry, booking the appointment, driving out, doing the scanning, coming back, doing the assessment, producing the certificate and sending it off? There is a lot of time in that — transport costs, time on site, time in the office. How many can one person get through in a day? You would have to group them geographically and go house to house, then come back and do all the NatHERS side. I really think the scale stream model, where a group goes out and sends it to a group of assessors, is the only way this becomes viable.

53:00But are you not going to get eaten straight away by bigger companies who can do it cheaper, because you can only access people in your region? That is the big risk for me. I am a sole operator. If I go down this pathway I have to set something up with local real estate agents, and probably only one agent, and hope I never lose them. At some point the big fish comes in. If mandatory disclosure arrives, the photographer who does the floor plans you see on the listings goes out anyway — are they going to undercut you or work with you?

54:26We talked about it in training this week: how much will this cost, what is it worth? They are talking around nine hundred dollars per assessment on average. That is not what NatHERS is saying at the moment — they are saying three hundred. I agree with Andrew, I think that is where it will end up. The reason I looked at you both is that the price on the scale stream was based on what we were told and how quickly it was meant to be done. That expectation is gone. It will be more expensive. And if you want to sit down with the client, it is going to be more again, because that is your time researching options and presenting a report.

56:00Is it viable then, the way Scorecard was, if we are pricing ourselves out for the amount of data we are collecting? It is way more difficult than Scorecard. And for a homeowner to pay eight hundred to a thousand dollars and then get a rating where you have not even checked whether there is ceiling insulation, so it is not within a star or two, and it is a three star result — that is just not going to be a good experience.

56:50For listeners: we have decade bands with the insulation. If it was built between 1960 and 1970, we put this insulation in the walls and this in the roof. You do not actually know what the insulation is, because is somebody going to remove a power point and look inside the wall, or stick their head into the roof and measure? Can you imagine trying to predict the U-value and solar heat gain of forty year old windows? So are these assessments worth anything if we are assuming so much?

57:39Against that, we did the calculations on the exact same house rated as a new house and rated in existing homes, and when you do know the insulation and glazing levels they stack up really well. So I am confident that if the data is put together properly it will give an accurate rating. We just need to get rid of the assumptions, and I do not know how that is possible with what we have to work with.

58:12I am not sure the assumptions are too far off the mark. We know when insulation regulations came in. We know that for the vast majority of homes, if it was not required it was not done — or maybe it was just foil on the walls. Even with the pink batts scheme it was still set values, because that is what they were being paid to install. So there is enough generalisation to set a fairly firm benchmark. Yes, you need flexibility — maybe the house had an addition and they did upgrades, so you have a look as best you can, and you probably invest in more tools to get an idea of what is in a wall or a roof space. It is never going to be accurate unless you can pull off a weatherboard or put a camera between the studs, but from what I am seeing it does not scream that it is a problem. It is an estimate.

59:35And it is emphasised enough that it is on the assessor going out to do the best they absolutely can. They are talking hundreds of photos, putting sticks up in the roof, looking everywhere you can. If you opened a trap door under the floor and could see insulation, what does that tell you about the walls? If they did the floor, they obviously cared enough — could they have done the walls as well? So take more care and look.

1:00:18What if the owner says they insulated the walls themselves with R6 and it turns out they only put in R4, and they are inflating the numbers? If they cannot prove it with documentation, it did not happen. That is basically what the technical note says — no receipt, no order form, it did not happen, and you fall back on the default values because it cannot be proven.

1:01:02So with mandatory disclosure, we are assuming that when you sell a house the assessment goes into the vendor statement, and potentially it is displayed on the listing sites. That is the intent, I believe. And if the house is rented, it will have to be in the lease contract for the tenant to understand the efficiency of the house.

1:01:37So say a house was meant to be rated as a reasonably new house, five years old, meant to be six stars, and someone did a verification report on it — you go out and the insulation levels are nowhere near six stars and it comes back at 3.2. How do we navigate that? It is going to happen a lot.

1:02:03Maybe not in New South Wales, because we have the do-it-yourself route. You would not believe how often I see a home where the builder did their own BASIX. You can walk in and see straight away this home is two years old and it is single clear throughout.

1:02:24There are going to be huge challenges going back to the builders. Where this has been live a very long time overseas there is serious money attached to each star, and people have paid for a home of a certain performance level. If they are not getting it, and not getting it on resale — well, we do not have any verification of a newly built home. That probably needs to start there.

1:02:55Since we all started talking about existing homes, I feel that if you build a home now it becomes an existing home. In a couple of years, that is now an existing home. The problem is we have no way of verifying that what was specified was actually built, other than a letter from the builder.

1:05:34Trying to do an existing home assessment in this space, where houses have such a variety of upgraded windows — how do you tell if it is a thermally broken frame, or what type of Low-E coating and how many layers? There is technology that can tell you, but it is expensive. Could you imagine every established homes assessor having to buy something like that? We are talking around twenty-five thousand dollars for the base machine.

1:06:39It is early days though, and it is a program that is changing. They will keep evolving it and making decisions, and once it goes live we will have a decision. This is part of what they are doing at the moment — you have been the test subjects on that part of it.

1:07:16It is a great scheme once the whole thing is in. Even looking at the database, the new homes are well and truly above minimum compliance, because everybody is educated now that a comfortable home is worth more. It is quality of life, it is healthy living. But there is a lot of teething to get through. One of the scary things is people getting that rating and then starting to upgrade their home. As soon as we seal all the draughts in those old homes, we could end up with mould and condensation, and they have gas heating points and do not know they have to ventilate. There is a whole bunch of issues where we need to be careful that we are supporting homeowners through that journey.

1:08:12Thank you so much for joining us tonight, Tracey. It has been an absolute pleasure. Thanks for having me.